Ditching a lucrative career in finance, Vu Dinh Tu opened a coffee shop without telling his parents, joining a wave of young Vietnamese entrepreneurs using espressos to challenge family expectations around work.
Traditionally taken black, sometimes with condensed milk, or even egg, coffee has long been an integral part of Vietnamese culture.
However, starting a cafe is not a career that many of Vietnam’s growing group of ambitious middle-class parents would choose for their children.
Photo: AFP
“At first my family didn’t know much about it,” 32-year-old Tu said. “Gradually they found out — and they weren’t very supportive.”
Tu’s parents repeatedly tried to convince him to stay in his well-paid investment banking job, but he persevered and opened four branches of Refined over four years in Hanoi.
Each is packed from morning till night with coffee lovers enjoying Vietnamese robusta beans — in surroundings more like a cocktail bar than a cafe.
Photo: AFP
His parents “saw the hard work involved in running a business — handling everything from finances to staffing, and they didn’t want me to struggle,” Tu said.
Vietnam was desperately poor until the early 2000s, pulling itself up with a boom in manufacturing, but many parents want to see their children climb the social ladder by moving into steady, lucrative professions such as medicine and law. Coffee, on the other hand, has become a byword for creativity and self-expression.
In Vietnam, “cafes have become a way to break norms around family pressure to do well in school, go to college, get a degree ... work in something that is familiar and financially stable,” said Sarah Grant, an associate professor at California State University.
“They have also become spaces of possibility where you can bring together creative people in a community, whether that’s graphic designers ... musicians, other kinds of do-it-yourself type people,” said Grant, an anthropologist specializing in Vietnam.
Coffee first arrived in Vietnam in the 1850s during French colonial rule, but a shift in the 1990s and early 2000s to large-scale production of robusta — usually found in instant brews — made the country a coffee production powerhouse and the world’s second-largest exporter.
A passion for the coffee business is often linked to that history, Grant said.
Coffee entrepreneurs are “really proud that Vietnam is this coffee-producing country and has a lot of power in the global market,” she added.
Down a tiny alley in the heart of the capital, 29-year-old Nguyen Thi Hue was mixing a lychee matcha cold brew in her new glass-fronted shop — a one-woman “Slow Bar” coffee business.
“When making coffee, it’s almost like being an artist,” said Hue, who had her first cup as a young child thanks to a neighbor who roasted his own.
Coffee is also hugely trendy, and there is money to be made if a cafe appeals to selfie-loving Generation Z.
“No one dresses poorly to go to a cafe,” said Hue, herself decked out in stylish bright-blue-rimmed glasses and matching necktie.
Relaxing at a rival shop nearby, Dang Le Nhu Quynh, a 21-year-old university student, is typical of the new generation of customer — she says the cafe’s style is what counts for her more than the brews.
“I don’t like coffee that much,” she said.
Vietnam’s US$400 million coffee shop industry is growing up to 8 percent a year, branding consultancy Mibrand said.
Thousands of shops are not officially registered with authorities, said Vu Thi Kim Oanh, a lecturer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Vietnam.
“If we have problems with a job at the office, then we quit and we think: ‘Let’s get some money together ... choose one place, rent a house and then open a coffee shop,’” she said. “If it goes well, then you continue. If it doesn’t, you change.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including